The first film we watched that was deliberately part of the Hooptober challenge was Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Teenagers in a small town are dropping like flies, apparently in the grip of mass hysteria causing their suicides. A cop’s daughter, Nancy Thompson, traces the cause to child molester Fred Krueger, who was burned alive by angry parents many years before. Krueger has now come back in the dreams of his killers’ children, claiming their lives as his revenge. Nancy and her boyfriend, Glen, must devise a plan to lure the monster out of the realm of nightmares and into the real world…
Freddy is “my” slasher villain. Jason and Michael didn’t really catch my attention, possibly because I was a little bit too young when their first installments came out. I’m guessing I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street (along with 2 and 3) on video but, I definitely saw some of the later films on the big screen. And for me and my friends, Freddy was the guy.
I love weird, mind-bendy films, and the “nightmares that can kill” hook of the Elm Street series means the films get to play around a lot more than the grounded slashers like Friday the 13th and Halloween. There’s only so much you can do with a silent villain with a knife. Freddy gets to crack jokes and warp the world into whatever demented form the writers can come up with which makes for a far more varied and entertaining series.
I remember the third film, Dreamwarriors, as being the best, but I’m not sure that one will have aged well. The first movie, though? That one still works. There’s less wisecracking from Freddy, the acting has that 80s teen movie woodenness, and it features some of the worst running I’ve ever seen in a movie, but it was still a fun way to spend an evening.
I have all the Nightmare films on DVD, even the reboot, and at some point, I’m going to rewatch them all.
A Nightmare on Elm Street contributes to four categories for Hooptober – 80s, New World Pictures, Wes Craven, and 1984. It’s almost as though Cinemamonster deliberately set up the criteria to encourage everyone to revisit Freddy’s first appearance.
[Hooptober 11 – A Nightmare on Elm Street by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 22nd October 2024]